Rarely have a writer and a composer seemed so made for each other as Franz Kafka and the 84-year-old Hungarian Gyorgy Kurtag. Kafka reveals the metaphysical terror lurking in everyday things, Kurtag takes the most shopworn musical gestures and makes them seem rich and strange.
In Kurtag’s Kafka-Fragments, a soprano sings 40 fragments from the writer’s letters and diaries, some as short as a single line. She’s accompanied by a single violinist, who threads a fragile commentary through her strangled song. Much of the time the mood is quietly desperate: “Slept, woke, slept, woke: miserable life.”
The human dilemma is seized with crystalline clarity: “My prison-cell — my fortress.” Sometimes a ray of light breaks in: “To be smiled at by her in a rowing boat, that was the most wonderful of all.” But amidst these scattered thoughts is there a scenario, something that could be teased out into a theatrical production?
The director Peter Sellars thinks there is, and at the Barbican we saw the European premiere of his new production of the piece. Seizing on the references to cleaning and daily routine, he pictures the narrator of these fragments as a harassed housewife.
Dawn Upshaw took the role, and how well she seized it. A feisty little figure in a checked shirt, she scrubbed away furiously at a mark on the floor and ironed obsessively, as if the whole key to the universe lay in getting everything spotless. Despite the arduous domestic round, Upshaw’s rendition of Kurtag’s austere lines never faltered.
Violinist Geoff Nuttall was no less focused. Standing slightly in shadow, he took on a somewhat Mephistophelean role, his scratchy lines like troubling thoughts being dripped slyly into her ear.
Meanwhile on a huge screen behind Upshaw we saw the texts of the fragments in English translation, interspersed with images of deserts and scudding clouds. These summoned up the idea of travel and transformation, which is another theme of the fragments.
All this was suggestive. It let air into a piece which threatens to become airless, and it prised the texts out of their familiar middle-European world and gave them a vivid sense of the here-and-now. Unfortunately Sellars couldn’t resist bringing in images of the Sri Lankan tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, which sullied the focus. But this was only a brief lapse in what was otherwise a tellingly restrained conception, thrillingly brought to life.